I know it could just be the weather, but I’ve been in Love with Ohio for the past couple of days and think I’m going to leave this state with my opinion of it forever upgraded. For all that an ex-girlfriend tried her damnedest, tt never hurts when it’s sunshiney and 70. It doesn’t hurt when you’ve got kind of a cool place to stay and have played interesting venues. The only reason I am looking kind of suspiciously at the weather is that though the GIGS we’ve played have been very good and the open mics have been interesting, the latter haven’t been lucrative at ALL and normally I’d feel kind of like I’m losing against the world.
Instead I feel like I’m winning. We just got into Falcon Ridge. That doesn’t hurt. I’m sitting in one of those coffeehouses that is everything that a coffeehouse SHOULD be: a re-purposed church with great seats, great sound, a good performer on stage and solid wireless and REALLY excellent food. And that definitely doesn’t hurt either.
Heather feasts on another exquisite Le Chocoholique creation.
Frankly, it reminds me of the Presbyterian Church where Kermit and Fozzie find the Electric Mayhem. It’s rocking like that too. Oh wait… no it’s not. It folks.
In the end it’s got to be the weather. Though the venues have been cool, it’s been a temperature thing as much as anything else and people who are out playing are not out playing HERE, and this coffeehouse again falls into the category of places that I wish I could transport. After a short night and a couple of CD sales we retreat back to our friend Mat’s hostel and watch nature documentaries till 2am. I’m trying to be aware of the fact that I only get to wake up late for another couple of days and then it’ll be 9am consciousness calls for the remainder of this trip, but though that means I should be easing myself into a schedule, it actually translates into thinking “nope, for two more days I can sleep as LATE AS I WANT!!!”
The hostel environment is slightly strange for me. Though we often stayed with people we didn’t know very well when all this began (almost SEVEN YEARS AGO!!!), by now we’re used to crashing with close friends. Hostels are strange because they’ve got a home-like environment and faces that rapidly become familiar to you, but no-one talks too much. Some of that is language. The other guy who has been sharing our room for the past couple of days has apparently been here for a month and hasn’t said more than four words to anyone. He said them to me: “No English” and after a “I’m rob” I got a “Song Po”…. Well, maybe a fifth word because after I repeated that to him he said “no….” He’s from Korea and he vanished yesterday to be replaced with a big guy local to the area whose conversations have mostly centered around finding wireless codes and ironing boards.
In our continued wanderings and sort of in the same category as Kitchen Sorceror – this has got to be the best name for a computer shop EVER.
Monday finds us at an open mic next door to a used book store. This is one of my favourite sorts, filled to overflowing and artsy to boot. Above is the seating outside, painted book spines on top of a repurposed radiator. Have tried something a little different with my code to make the page flow differently – haven’t decided if I hate it or not. You may never see this again…. Like I said – full to overflowing! In our continued wanderings and sort of in the same category as Kitchen Sorceror – this has got to be the best name for a computer shop EVER.
Some of it is schedule. I’ve often been aware that we’re not the target demographic. This week we’d encountered a guy who appeared to be walking to Canada, a guy who might’ve JUST flown in from Honduras who was grateful for my help with his bags, but I think exhausted his vocabulary telling me so…. It’s a very broad cross-section of the world. India House in New Orleans was the most hostelly of them all, with gardens and a maze-like interior, kittens and turtles and Germans and foreign currency glued to the walls. The Indy hostel was my first and just seemed like a group home filled with a friendly group. The Baltimore Hostel’s somewhere between the two, artsier but sort of given to school groups and traveling couples – and the Purple Fiddle’s group accommodations are VERY hostel-like, with multiple multiple-bed rooms and signs about how to share bathrooms. We’re just traveling musicians. We get up late, we stay out late. We’re kind of jaded to the travel and this is our Life. Most people at hostels are either aliens or on an adventure or both. I’m sort of aware that we’re just traveling on business, trying to enjoy our cities where we can, but also kind of grateful for time to sit still and watch TV.
Not to say the stay hasn’t been pleasant. Mat and his friends gather most every night in the backyard around a bonfire burning whatever broken furniture they can find, toasting marshmallows and swapping stories and drinking local wine and cheap beer (oh, my friends of cheap wine and local beer, you’d be horrified!). I’m horribly aware that I’m bad at being social here. It’s funny how Heather and I seem to get along better in different towns. Providence and Boston and Saint Louis I’M the social one, but anyplace named Columbus or Putnam or most all of North Carolina Heather takes the lead – and for the past couple of days I’ve felt like a wallflower looking for a chance to join the dance and always missing my cues.
Still, it’s fun to watch. I just sort of feel like Song Po over there, unable to quite join in.
Tonight we play a meadery. I’d never heard of such a thing till a couple of weeks ago when some local friends put the show together. It sounds like a wonderful place and friends at home are saying “you should grab ME a bottle!”. Oh, how I wish I could take friends to all of these amazing places, or bring the places to the friends. I have lists of lands that I think people’s Lives will be lessened by never having seen (a hard sentence but maybe it makes sense) and my friends will never know. They’ll say “yeah, that DOES sound cool…. It doesn’t really come across in the picture though”.
